Cat care

Chester has hurt his tail. We have only been back for a week and he has got in a fight. I suppose boys will be boys, and cats will be cats, and boy cats will fight in your back garden. He came in all subdued and smoochy, which is a sure sign that he has done something wrong, got hurt by it, and now wants comforting (see what I mean about boys?).

So I took him to see the lovely people at Remarkable Vets. He has been a kitty client of theirs before. They were pleased to see him. I think this was because they genuinely think he is a cool cat but the fact that he keeps incurring vet fees can't do him any disservice.

He was less pleased to see them. They injected him with anaesthetic, shaved off his fur, sliced and drained an abscess and patched him up with a poultice bandage. As you can see, he is unimpressed. The vet tells me that as the injury is to his tail, this probably means he was running away. Wounds around the head are more likely to indicate that the cat was the aggressor. I always knew he was a lover; not a fighter.

The bandage was meant to stay on for 24 hours, but he was relentless until he had chewed it off. I guess it lasted about 20 hours though, so that's not too bad. He is now on a course of antibiotics which, fortunately, we can disperse into his food. Have you ever tried to give a cat a pill? It's not easy. They don't understand it's for their own good, and they are damn sure that it is going to hurt you at least as much as it hurts them.

Chester is not quite a million-dollar moggie, but he's getting there. In his short life he has been savaged by a dog, hit by a car, sliced a tendon in his paw and now been in a cat fight. I expect there will be more. I keep telling him that his behaviour is unbecoming to a pedigree, but he's not having any of it.

Interestingly, the vet bill was broken down into individual costs for the drugs, surgery and care. None of this stuff comes cheap. I'm not suggesting we should pay for health care as humans, but sometimes I think, if it weren't for the administration costs, it wouldn't go amiss to actually see how much each hospital visit costs. Someone has to pay for all that, and it comes out of your taxes. It might help to know what you're paying for, and perhaps we would make better, and more appreciative, patients, who take control of our own recovery - Chester will certainly be keeping his wounds clean.

And maybe, just maybe, teenagers would think twice before hurtling drunkenly towards each other at speed if they knew how much it costs to deliver them from each smouldering car wreck. But then again, maybe not. After all, boys will be boys...